In our recently published report, Ron Rogowski, Stephen Powers, and I explored how organizations are rethinking their personalization strategies. Organizations have long understood the need to "personalize" their websites for customer segments in order to meet customer needs, feel personal, and deliver in the moment. But we’ve seen many organizations fail to deliver highly relevant experiences to their customers. "We were about to launch personalized content, but our dog ate the segmentation and targeting strategy." We haven't heard that one (yet), but organizations and their agencies frequently cite a familiar set of reasons for continuing to offer non- or underpersonalized sites.

What’s going wrong? Organizations fail when delivering contextual experiences. They must take into account who the customer is, what that customer did in the past, and the customer’s situation — what’s happening to the customer at that moment and from which touchpoint he or she is engaging with the brand. While they may take one or two of these into account, many organizations we speak with (especially outside of the eCommerce space) fail to take all three into account.

What does this mean for application development and delivery professionals? After all, IT will eventually need to support these contextualization initiatives. Here are a few questions to get you started:

This is a co-authored blog post by Forrester Analysts David Aponovich and Michael Facemire.

Corporations and brands are jumping through hoops (and spending lots of money) to build and support mobile customer experiences. It has us asking: Where are the web content management (WCM) vendors in all of this?

The answer that applies to many: Missing in action.

Here is a group of tech vendors whose R&D and acquisitions have been incredibly focused on enabling digital experiences and helping marketers and brands connect with customers online.

Yet many web content management vendors serving enterprise and midmarket clients still lack a fully baked mobile solution for back-end developers or their marketing counterparts, or even a road map that considers the place for mobile and cross-channel experiences in their content management and future digital experience ecosystems (think: interactive TV, point-of-sale digital, even interactive goggles, or whatever new channels emerge). Clients are jumping in completely, and they’re looking for the best tools, solutions, and services to make a successful leap. They’re looking right at you, vendors.

Here’s what they see: Not every WCM vendor today is adept or positioned to offer deep mobile solutions.

Vendors lacking this power and capacity to support mobile initiatives will face challenges as specific WCM competitors answer this need. And here’s the other rub: non-WCM tools and techniques are gaining momentum and serving as the path of least resistance for companies that need, today, to get mobile with their content, sites, and experiences, preferably without redeveloping from scratch.

Big data - It screams, it cries, it's ugly, it's beautiful, it's honest, it lies, it's mysterious, it's everywhere, and it grows infinitely. But, don't worry.

Over the past year, we’ve been discussing — through our research and client interactions — the issues involved with digital customer experiences. What’s interesting about this particular problem is how quickly the market is changing and how the issues cut across many roles and aspects of the business. How do you build a digital experience strategy that best suits your business needs and is inclusive of the roles that have a stake in digital experience success?

We have two Forrester webinars planned over the next week to discuss these very issues. Tomorrow’s webinar (November 20) will be held at 2:00 p.m. UK time (3:00 pm CET), and my colleagues David Aponovich, Jonathan Browne, Bobby Cameron, and I will discuss how digital experience strategies affect roles such as CIOs, Customer Experience Professionals, and Application Development & Delivery professionals. Next Tuesday (November 27) John Rymer, Adele Sage, and I will do a similar webinar at 1:00 pm ET/10:00 am PT. Both of these webinars will be fast-moving, interactive discussions and will use a Pardon the Interruption-style format where we’ll cover a number of questions about DX strategies and give ourselves 3 minutes to discuss each question before moving on. We’ll also be taking questions from the audience.